Tales From the Tissue Trenches

I’d like to say that sometimes being sick allows me to slow down and reconfigure my priorities, but at this point today the only thing I’m really contemplating is whether I should get up from my latest nap or just turn right around and go back to sleep.

The only good thing about getting this sick is that I do actually give myself permission to let go of things. (If I’m on the fence, it generally means I can probably get something done. If I’m like I am today, I don’t have much choice, really. How do I know this? If I can’t even get the energy up to play WoW, I’m sick. Period.)

*ahem*

Before the sick-fest, I did manage to get some revision stuff done on Saturday – I went through about 150 pages or so. And for the first run through of revisions, I’m not actually doing any editing – it’s more of an overview where I spread out the pages of the manuscript and go to town with my post its. I take a red pen and make notes of where I need to add things, or take things out, or if I need to move a section somewhere else. It doesn’t do me any good to actually start doing any real editing until I’ve got the entire road-map laid out. If I start changing things at the beginning, and then get toward the end and I realize I no longer need that beginning section, then all I’ve done is waste time.

A good deal of what I need to do is lay down the groundwork from the first book – things that new readers wouldn’t know if they didn’t read the first, or that people may have forgotten from the first book. I don’t usually write those things down on my first set of drafts because I don’t want to get bogged down in things *I* already know. In theory, the addition of a few lines here or there, or a subtle description should be enough to fill in the blanks.

The last third of the book is going to be the hardest for me, I think, since I got a little off track. I’m fine with the overall ending, but how I get there is a bit more convoluted than I would like it to be, so that’s going to require some major brainstorming on my part. It’s entirely possible I may cut out a huge chunk of it and just rewrite it from scratch, though that’s a little more extreme than I’d like to do.

Still – when it comes to writing, sometimes that is what is required.

Since my brain is mostly mush today, I suspect I’ll just spend the time contemplating various scenarios and see what comes up.

On a completely unrelated note? A Brush of Darkness is apparently a candidate for the Compton Crook Award. 🙂 (Got a nice email the other day about it, so yay!)